Break Time

Sorry for the latency in my blogging, but I've been a little busy...so get over it. First off, check out this cool sunset we shot on Valentine's Day:

Sunset at Stuart's from Cloudy Logic on Vimeo.

So, here's how the story goes...I think. Ken and I have shot a sunset before when we shot "Let Sleeping Squirrels Lie" for the Orlando 48 Hour Film Project. When we did it then, it was time lapse so we could adjust the aperture, as we kept losing light, in-between time lapse recordings. It wasn't perfect, but as you can see from the movie, it turned out pretty good. This time, we decided to let it record at 24fps, with the Letus Ultimate and some sweet Zeiss Prime lenses. "But Willie, if you did that you can't adjust the F-stop on the fly. What did you do?" Good question, half-pint. The answer is, "We didn't."

We set the aperture wide open. I think we had the 25 on, so it was at a 2.8? I'm sure Ken will correct me. Well shooting the sun at a 2.8 is a DP's worst nightmare even though we had a ND1 set...oh and some gradient glass. I don't remember if we lost a full stop or more with that or not. I think it was a stop and a half. Even with all of that, the sun was still blown out, but we knew that. It had to be blown out and we could only hope we had enough light coming into the lens to get the sun setting.

Once the sun had set, we pulled the gradient glass and turned off the ND filter. Ken also changed the batteries on the Letus. After spending a couple minutes in the pit, we pressed record on the camera again, and let it go for another half an hour or so.

In post, I did very little color correction. Didn't want to jack the blacks up too much because the footage was dark enough as is. So I brought up the whites and the saturation a little so the lights would glow more in the night shot. I had to speed up the footage, so I sped it up 10,000% except for the part when the sun actually sets. I only sped that up 3000%. I did a cross dissolve between the two clips (remember we stopped the camera to pull the glass, change batteries, etc) and made it look as seamless as possible. I spent about an hour putting together the score using Soundtrack Pro. Tossed it all together like a Caesar salad and called it done.

Whew! That was a lot of typing. Okay, before I get back to playing with After Effects, check out a few things I'm digging right now because they are WONDERFULLY produced:







Stay tuned!